A Workers’ School: The Educational Experience of the MST in Brazil

CÉLIA REGINA VENDRAMINI

TRANSLATED FROM PORTUGUESE BY SÓNIA VAZ BORGES

Internationally known for its land struggles, the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST) in Brazil also gave a central role to education. By approaching some of the struggles that the movement face, namely land, agrarian reform, and social change, Célia Regina Vendramini shows us how education links these struggles, transforming the movement as an educational praxis. 

Since its origin, the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST) includes school as a field of struggle. Being one of the organized social movements that is most concerned with educational issues, the MST understands that the whole family participates in the struggle for land, and this includes children and young people. Moreover, the education of the rural population has always occupied a secondary place and is marginalized in the Brazilian educational system, with low schooling and the presence of non-literate people (today estimated at 11 millions, equivalent to 6.6% of the population over 15 years old; in the rural areas 15.8%). The existing programs for rural education were also ready-made and uniform models, aiming more at moralization, civilization, and hygienization, than education and access to knowledge. Thus, the educational issue enters the agenda of the MST, which aims at building access to schooling for the landless. But, fundamentally, this access to education is articulated with the social and cultural context, and with the history of struggles in the countryside.

As a movement struggling for land, the MST confronts land ownership, but also the ownership of knowledge and cultural goods in general. It constitutes the history of struggles and social movements in Brazil, which go back to European colonization and over 500 years of expropriation and exploitation. It is the expression of historical resistance for Indigenous people, Black people in the Quilombos, rural workers and peasant women, people expelled from the forests, among others. In this process, the debate about the nature of land ownership and the need for agrarian reform comes into play.

Such struggles are presented in the face of the historical concentration of land in Brazil, and at the same time, of the most advanced and modern phase of capitalism worldwide, expressed today through agribusiness. The magnitude of the agrarian issue in Brazil lies in the availability of and demand for land.

In this context, the MST and other social movements in the countryside and cities emerge as an expression of the extreme social inequality in the rural areas: the expropriation of land, natural resources, and the means of subsistence of the working class, as well as education. It defines itself as a social movement of popular, trade unionist (syndicalist), and political character. It has been at the forefront of land struggles in Brazil for almost forty years and has already gained land for 450,000 families. The principle form of struggle of the Movement takes is the occupation of large unused areas that do not fulfill the social function of the land (as foreseen by the Federal Constitution) and the constitution of encampments, whose presence of hundreds or even thousands of families exerts pressure for the expropriation of these areas for agrarian reform.

Some characteristics mark the existence and the particularity of the Landless Movement and its educational experience.

National and international organization ///

Although it emerged from land occupations in the southern region of Brazil in the late 1970s, with the slogan “Terra para quem nela trabalha” (“Land for those who work on it”), the MST presented itself as a national movement from the First Congress held in 1985. It raised the banner for struggle as “Ocupação é a única solução” (“Occupation is the only solution”) and defined its three main objectives: struggle for land, for agrarian reform, and for social change in the country. In the last Congress held in 2014, it defined its motto as “Lutar, construir reforma agrária popular!” (“Fight, build popular agrarian reform!”).

As a nation-wide movement, and considering the dimensions of Brazil, the degree of internal coherence, effective presence in all regions, and homogeneity in the forms of struggle draws attention.

However, while the importance of the MST in mobilizing landless families can be observed, the slow expropriation of land in the country is also evident. The internationalization of rural social movements struggles, among them the MST, led to the creation of the Via Campesina in 1993, which gathers several peasant organizations, agricultural workers, women, and Indigenous communities from five continents.

Radicality ///

The occupations and encampments are actions of great radicalism, since they question the private ownership of the land and the means of production and subsistence in general. Radicality is also manifested in the permanent combativeness of the organized landless, from the occupation of the latifundia (large private farming land) to the organization of assentamentos (agrarian reform communities) once the land is gained. The Movement’s tactics assume continuous struggle, that is, it does not end with the gain and possession of the land, as demonstrated by another of its mottos: “Occupy, resist, and produce.”

Within those who fight to gain land through encampments, there are assentados (members of agrarian reform communities), who remain engaged in the Movement, aiming to stay permanently on the land. This is the double character of the MST: the mass struggle for land and the organization of production in the assentamentos. This is a field of continuous tension, which reveals the priority policies of the Movement and the context in which it moves between radical occupation actions and the struggle to make assentamentos viable for living in. The MST’s combative potency has diminished in recent years due to a number of factors, including the advance of agribusiness and the restructuring of production in the countryside; the constant attempts to criminalize the Movement; the slow pace of agrarian reform; the co-optation of militants; the welfare policies that have repercussions and fracturing potential for the MST’s organization; among others.

Politicizing and educational practices ///

The MST transforms its members from patients into active agents who fight for their own destiny. As a space for political socialization, it disseminates practical learning on how to unite, organize, participate, and fight, in addition to elaborating upon a social identity, an awareness of their interests and rights, and finally, a critical apprehension of the world, with its practices, social and cultural representations. The Movement materializes the idea that it is possible to fight for a collective project.

In this project, a program of political and technical education that combines the development of capacities for structural change with the capacity to produce, is gaining ground. In addition, the MST invests in the creation of leadership so that the liberation of the peasants is a product of the peasants themselves. All its activities (meetings, marches, public acts, occupations, etc.) are considered moments of political formation.

The first educational initiatives were aimed at the schooling of small children who accompanied their parents in the struggle for land. Needs have increased and become more complex, in relation to the schooling of children and also of youth and adults. This involves professionalization, higher education, as well as updating school content and the training of its teachers.

Learning from the occupations and camps ///

Breaking through a fence, entering a forbidden area, facing the private militia of the large landowners, controlling fear and uncertainty, facing cold or heat, leaving behind family, friends, and the few belongings, are some of the actions and feelings present in the occupation of an area. The fence is either already literally broken, or has had to be broken, such as those of the schools and universities and several historically privately appropriated spaces.

By bringing together people with the same problem (expropriation of the land and the means of subsistence) and a shared ideal (gaining land), it allows a change in their perspective of life and the re-elaboration of their vision of the world, interfering in their habits, morals and ways of behaving. At the same time, the encampments are permeated with tensions, not only those arising from the objective living situation and external threats, but also those provoked by internal problems resulting from the difficulties of living together in the same space, the incompatibility of habits and ways of life, internal disputes, among others.

The day-to-day routine of an encampment is an example of intense training for the assentados. It consists of committee meetings (food, health, education, hygiene, safety, production, and finance) and núcleos meetings (which bring together around ten to twenty families) that inform and discuss issues of the encampment, the problems to be solved, the distribution of tasks, etc. When necessary, an assembly is called for the main deliberations. In the meetings, people are challenged to speak, to write down directions to later pass them on, or to memorize them. We observe workers with hands calloused by the use of a hoe, holding a pen and trying to write; people who are used to just taking orders and obeying rather than having to give an opinion. Even children learn early on to organize themselves, setting up their own committees.

What characterizes life in the encampment is the organization and the daily struggle, in a situation of precariousness and fear. Although many families live for years in the encampment, the context is always one of tension and temporariness. There was one case in which the eviction of camped families by the authorities was avoided because of the existence of the school and the many children studying there.

The itinerant schools, which operate inside the encampments, are organized in a dynamic similar to that of the encampment, accompanying its movement (given the recurrent evictions) and experimenting with different ways of educating children and young people. This is done through collective management and self-organization, with an emphasis on collectivity and critical knowledge of reality.

The socio-educational experience in the assentamentos ///

The struggles waged by the MST, through land occupations, encampments, and large marches, aim at gaining the land for a mass of landless workers through the constitution of assentamentos, which signifies a victory. The settlement is first constituted by the expropriation of an area, through the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA). In this process, new challenges are presented: planning and organizing production and work, credit, commercialization, the struggle for infrastructure, housing, schools, health, that is, it is a new beginning in the lives of families who lost their land or never had it. It is an important space for the resocialization of the rural population to integrate themselves into society in a more decent and dignified way.

In their new life as assentados, workers and their families are faced with a set of needs that were not part of their daily lives in the encampment or before it. They must plan their lives and work: deciding how to organize production (collectively or individually), what to plant and where, with what resources, which projects to seek financing, technical assistance, and deciding which external agents to negotiate with. These decisions are accompanied by conflicts that arise with different families’ previous production experiences and the expectations they have with this role of assentados, which are not always convergent.

Some assentamentos are organized collectively by means of cooperatives, associations, or other cooperative forms, showing what is considered most advanced in the organizational forms of workers. There are 1,900 associations and 160 cooperatives in the assentamentos, which work in a collective or semi-collective way, many of them producing without pesticides. However, a large part of the assentados face internal and external difficulties in the production of life, which results in great part from the absence of an agricultural policy that prioritizes small rural producers. On the other hand, it is necessary to consider the many contradictions in the formulation and practice of cooperatives, starting with the mismatch between old, top-down relations of production that tend to perpetuate themselves and the new relations that landless workers want to build from their collectivist experiences. We can also mention the reduction of various forms of cooperation, to the cooperative form, and the implementation of a market-oriented agro-industry.

The MST has gained many assentamentos in different Brazilian states, but a significant number of assentados are not organized within the MST and have their central concerns limited to the immediate issues of reproduction of life. This condition—together with other factors—contributes to pushing the Movement, to a certain extent, towards more immediate struggles related to accessing benefits (credits) for production, housing, among others.

As for the schools, they are an achievement of the settled workers, and in many cases, the rural community was empty and the school was closed before being revitalized. There are more than 2,000 public schools in encampments and assentamentos attended by over 200,000 students for their basic education and high school. The schools in the assentamentos show the contradictions between the Movement’s pedagogical objectives and the state’s objectives for the schooling of working-class children. The MST’s struggle for public schools reveals its dependence on the state to universalize schooling in its areas but, at the same time, its opposition to the form and content of mainstream schooling, disseminated and controlled by that same state.

The conditions imposed by the state on the maintenance of the schools and the MST’s struggle to guarantee education in them reveal clashes. To begin with, the state’s lack of responsibility for financing education and the MST’s dependence on public policies provoke a certain instability and a decrease in the Movement’s autonomy. While educational proposals are funded through political agreements within the Movement, depending on the financial and political situation this can make the program unstable and subject to interruption at any moment. This has even led to the closing of schools and the denial of physical and personal infrastructure for the schools.

The school proposals in the MST spaces sometimes require answers from public authorities, such as the extension of school hours, hiring of more professionals, transportation for field classes—all of which are not financed by the state and are sometimes carried out through volunteer work by teachers, assentados and friends of the Movement.

We can observe some elements of change, for example in the elaboration of the Political Pedagogical Project, which involves the community and tries to articulate aspects of work and production within how the school is organized. We find teachers organized in groups of related knowledge areas, meeting to discuss the pedagogical practice in their respective classes and in the school as a whole. They then make curricular proposals and socialize them with other teachers. At another moment, the parents are the ones who will participate in this dialectical exercise of analysis and synthesis. This process is more evident in schools located in assentamentos with greater collective organization.

In this direction, the Complexes of Studies (inspired by the socialist educational experience in the early years of the Russian Revolution) represent a qualitative leap in the MST’s understanding of schooling, based on taking inventory of the realities surrounding the school, placing school knowledge on a level of importance correlated to other central elements of the Movement’s proposals: work, actuality, and self-organization, while at the same time provoking a new rearrangement between these dimensions.

We can also mention the organization of educational times, which combine study time and work time, and can be evaluated under two aspects. On the one hand, it promotes a close link between school content and the material production of life, on the other hand, it runs the risk of overloading young people with work, leaving little free time for study, reading, cultural experiences, etc.

The relationship between school content and reality has been in permanent tension since the first educational experiences of the MST. Sometimes, reality takes precedence over the content to be taught. In other situations, content from textbooks can act as the main reference point where a relation and/or illustration of reality is sought.

In the search for an organic articulation of the school with reality, an important reference is Paulo Freire. The educator contributed strongly to the formulation and educational practice of the MST, for considering education as essentially political, for defending that teaching should start from practice, from the experience of children, and for striving to value the culture and knowledge of the countryside, for emphasizing the right to speech, to participation, and to dialogue. We must point out that the references for the formulation of the MST’s pedagogy (based on Paulo Freire and the pioneers of the Russian socialist educational experience) are based on distinct theoretical foundations and social and historical contexts, even though they have several elements in common.

The school, besides being a necessity for the schooling of children and young people in the encampments and assentamentos, are necessarily different. Different from the traditional school that educates for subservience, from the school that is reduced to the classroom that denies the context of life and the struggles of social movements. The MST defends its schools and engaged educators, seeking to train teachers in its own courses and schools or in partnership with universities.

As for the young students, the goal is a formation capable of combining schooling with work, of promoting cultural experiences, and when the conditions for this are created, they would then be further involved in the activities of the MST.

The names of the schools mark the engaged formative process. They pay homage to Marxist thinkers, socialist leaders, and fighters of social movements, among them the MST itself. Thus, it is common to find schools named: Florestan Fernandes, Chico Mendes, José Marti, Che Guevara, Carlos Marighella, Zumbi dos Palmares, Paulo Freire, Herdeiros de Luta, etc.

Another relevant aspect in the formation of young people’s concerns is the continuity of their studies. The undergraduate and graduate courses won by social movements have made it possible for young working class people to have access to Brazilian public universities. Courses in Education, History, Law, Agronomy, and others, constitute a space for the formation and professional qualification of young people.

Beyond the institutionalized and formal spaces, non-formal education, present in the experiences of organization and struggles of the MST, presents a more promising scenario. It is possible to observe how the experiences acquired in the practice of landless people linked to the MST can be reappropriated for different purposes. This knowledge has been incorporated and transformed in the course of struggles for land: the experience of organizing, of participating and coordinating meetings, of leadership, of giving opinions, of creating tactics for the struggle, of elaborating projects, of negotiating and holding public demonstrations, of dividing traditional authoritarian spaces with women and young people, of participating in training courses, marches, public demonstrations, and others.

In summary, the trajectory of the MST shows four central elements that mobilize it in the struggle for schools: the struggle for social transformation, the relationship between work and education, the link between school content and reality, and the training of militants. There are several educational experiences that pursue such intent, such as: the Florestan Fernandes National School that is built and maintained through volunteer work, and constitutes a space for political training, in addition to several training centers in the Brazilian states; the Josué de Castro Institute of Education, which is administered in a self-managed way, and seeks to articulate school, technical, and political training; the itinerant schools in the MST camps that invented a new way of learning and teaching in movement; the schools located in the assentamentos and their challenge to articulate their teaching with the work and life of assentados; and, finally, the undergraduate and graduate courses in partnership with universities, which lead young workers to enter the best public universities in the country and favor an important exchange of experiences with university students not yet linked to social movements.

The current challenges of the MST and education ///

The MST’s challenges today are not solely its own, but those of the entire working class and its organizational forms, in the face of historical expropriative processes (of land, natural resources, livelihoods, labor rights) and the perverse forms of exploitation, the increase in unemployment, as well as informal, insecure, and disenfranchised labor contracts.

The MST faces two central issues. First, to expand and keep its base united and organized, considering the landless workers who waited for years to be granted land and the assentados who face great difficulties to remain on the land. This issue is associated with the achievement of concrete victories that motivate workers to continue in the Movement’s ranks. The second question concerns the construction of a common agenda for struggle with other workers in the countryside (permanent and temporary workers, migrants and others) and workers in the city.

The MST has shown itself to be an example in the construction of experiments, where new forms of struggle and organization are “invented,” or are incorporated from historical experiences, in counterpoint to old forms of intervention in a world marked by alienation. These experiments take place in various sectors: production, education, culture, training, collective organization. The most advanced experiences are based on self-management and cooperation, as well as solidarity with the landless people who have not yet gained the land, and with workers who face great difficulties in reproducing themselves.

Regarding educational experiences, their success is closely linked to the degree of organization in each camp and settlement, especially with regard to the capacity of collective and cooperative organization of production. Education and schooling in themselves are not capable of generating profound social changes, but they are nevertheless a fundamental element in the process of formation, when associated with the broader social processes of production and human reproduction. The experiences mentioned here, although contained within the limits of the current social relations, by contradiction, propagate new directions toward the full development of human capacities. ■